The present invention pertains generally to golf clubs and, more particularly, to golf club heads that include uniquely configured striking walls of non-uniform thickness.
Some conventional club heads (e.g. drivers and fairway woods) have hollow shells usually made of a metal such as steel, aluminum or titanium. These hollow shells have relatively thin walls, including a thin striking wall which defines a striking face used to impact a golf ball.
The use of hollow-type metal golf club heads has made the game of golf easier for the average golfer by enabling the club head to achieve a higher moment of inertia and coefficient of restitution (COR). For example, the increased size of a hollow-type metal club head generally results in the club head having a higher moment of inertia, which assists in maintaining the stability of the golf club through impact by mitigating head twist resulting from an off-center golf ball strike. In addition, the use of metal hollow-type golf club heads enables increased COR of the striking wall as a result of a greater ability to configure the striking wall to deflect during impact with a golf ball.
Golf club designers have pushed the performance boundaries of golf club heads even further by varying the thicknesses of the striking walls thereof. Along these lines, it is generally known to those skilled in the art in the design of golf club heads that reducing thickness at selected locations along the striking wall of the golf club head may enhance club performance by, among other things, increasing maximum COR and increasing the amount of discretionary mass. Nonetheless, conventional methods of configuring striking walls to improve performance fail to account for the effect of non-uniform thickness on the stress profile of the striking wall. Particularly, non-uniform thickness striking walls, in the manner that they vary, tend to generate, or insufficiently mitigate, high stress regions that may be susceptible to failure.